Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed and Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave, and Fighting for Air. Klinenberg is coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance and has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and This American Life. He lives in New York City.

Claudrena Harold is a professor of African American and African Studies and History. She is the associate dean for the social sciences and Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. In 2007, she published her first book, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. In 2013, the University of Virginia Press published The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration, a volume Harold coedited with Deborah E. McDowell and Juan Battle. Her second monograph, New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. In 2018, she and Louis Nelson coedited the volume, Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity. Her latest book is When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

As a part of her ongoing work on the history of black student activism at UVA, she has written, produced, and co-directed with Kevin Everson nine short films that have been screened at film festivals around the world.